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I
first got to know David Miller’s work through Kris Hemensley’s Ear in a
Wheatfield magazine in the early 1970s when I was living in Sydney. ‘South
London Mix’, a relatively early piece appeared therein. I made a note of this
work as it hinted at possible directions my own writing could take. I didn’t
see a lot more of Miller’s work until I moved to Britain in 2006 and started
attending the Blue Bus readings in Bloomsbury which he was organising. A collected volume had come out with the University of Salzburg Press in 1997 and a new
version of this appeared a couple of years after my arrival. Now Shearsman have
published Reassembling Still – Collected Poems, which contains all of the poems
Miller wishes to keep excluding the ongoing series Spiritual Letters (the
latest incarnation of this appeared with Chax in 2011). The new collected has
been carefully assembled and includes much early work not featured in the
previous gatherings. Miller writes a poetry which works through accretion and for
which a straightforward chronological arrangement would be a disservice, hence a
constant rearrangement over the years hinted at in the title. These poems come
from an ‘other’ tradition in English language writing that owes much to
poetries in other European languages as well as (in the diasporic anglo-world)
the work of writers like Cid Corman and Frank Samperi. It’s a most welcome assemblage.
with the
hint of summer
our minds turn to
salad
Last
night at the Enitharmon publishing house in London Lee Harwood launched his new
book The Orchid Boat. There was a full house and it was a pleasure, as ever, to
hear this wonderful and modest poet read his work. The book is Harwood’s first
substantial collection since the Shearsman Collected, which came out in 2004.
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